Senior Advice: Don’t Forget Yourself

Being a senior is by far one of the oddest experiences I’ve ever had. You’re in this strange place where people actually begin to treat you as an adult, but you still feel like a child that needs their hand to be held while reality is hurdling towards you like a bus.

But that’s honestly high school. You focus so much on the next project, quiz, test, essay that’s due, and it is very easy for school to takeover, blinding. So it’s very easy to forget yourself in all that ruckus. I don’t know about you, but I know that the competition of the academic world of today must be some sort of equivalent to the Olympics. Kids are creating businesses, inventing life-saving robots, and curing cancer all while maintaining a 4.0 GPA and taking all APs. There’s an immense pressure to be the best, so it’s easy to forget that behind all those assignments there’s an actual person.

People are complicated. Think about it. We are each entire universes of thoughts and ideas and goals that are all different and still forming. As teenagers, we can’t possibly comprehend all of that. There’s a reason that every high school movie has some element of self-discovery snuck in there. We’re allegedly supposed to use our fleeting youthful years to go out and discover ourselves.

I’m about to turn 18, and I don’t know how to “discover” a thing.

And if I’m 100% honest with myself, a big reason why is because I’ve dedicated a lot of my high school career to either being a good student, being a good athlete, or anything else that someone else is going to judge me on. It’s during college app season (which is really another synonym for self-exploration) when colleges are asking for the deepest, darkest parts of your soul that you are reminded that you aren’t meant to be some academic robot, but a person. So my grand senior advice to you is this: though they may be important, don’t let your academics take control of your person. Education will take you places, but you will not be a student forever. The only thing in life that is truly constant is yourself, so you should take the time to get to know you.

Now, you don’t need to go out and lead a life like the ones found in Gossip Girl or Vampire Diaries. I don’t know why writers seem to think high school is just some common place for occasional social gathering, but apparently they don’t think we spend any time in class.

The fact of the matter is that Home Access is probably one of the most visited links on your browser, and school is a reality in your life. But there lies some truth in the romanticism, somewhere deep, deep down. Don’t forget to use some of your time in high school to create who you want to be instead of just living up to the Georgia Standards. Looking back, I wish I did more of that. But it was a mistake that I made so that you don’t have to. Good luck.